Two men have been detained on suspicion of murder after police found human remains linked to a 2023 killing in Nantou County, following the surrender of one suspect earlier this month, prosecutors said yesterday.
The Nantou District Prosecutors’ Office said that a local court on Tuesday approved its request to detain a 22-year-old man surnamed Tsai (蔡) and a 24-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳).
On Dec. 7, Tsai turned himself in at a police station in Pingtung County, confessing to killing a 57-year-old woman surnamed Liu (劉) in October 2023 at a residence in Nantou, prosecutors said.
Photo: Chen Fong-li, Taipei Times
He said the body was dumped under a bridge in Fenyuan Township, Changhua County, prosecutors said.
After an initial search yielded no results, police expanded the operation with assistance from indigenous trackers familiar with the mountainous terrain. On Dec. 14, officers found a bag containing human bones in the area.
Chen was arrested on Dec. 15 as an alleged accomplice, and both suspects were transferred to prosecutors on murder charges.
The court approved their detention after questioning, citing the seriousness of the offense, which carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison, as well as concerns that they might flee, tamper with evidence or collude, prosecutors said.
The remains were examined on Monday, and DNA testing is under way to confirm the victim’s identity.
Chen’s statements differ from Tsai’s account, and the investigation is ongoing, prosecutors said.
Police said the victim lived alone and was last year reported missing, as her family had not noticed anything unusual earlier.
Investigators believe the two men collected debts for the woman, but later kept a promissory note for themselves. After an argument one of the men allegedly strangled her. Further details are still being clarified.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS